Chairman, Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters , Senator Opeyemi Bamidele has disclosed that it would have been extremely difficult to come out of recession if Nigerians were not lucky to have President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
Bamidele while speaking with newsmen commended President Muhammadu Buhari for squeezing water out of stone as far as infrastructure development is concerned between 2015 and now.
He said things would have been worse off for the country if somebody like President Muhammadu Buhari had not emerged as President in May 2015.
“If you ask me as a Nigerian, I will say regardless of what we will think about this administration, this is one administration that has been able to do much more in terms of infrastructure development of this country now that there is less money than was done by previous administrations when there was plenty of money.
“When I said plenty of money, if you go by the rate with which we sold our crude oil in the international market and how much money was accruing and how much money we had in our foreign reserve and what our naira was, I believe they were good old days for this country.
“We have an administration that came into office just at a point that that the international price of the crude oil was coming down and it went from over 100 dollars to as almost below 20 dollars.
“If Nigerians had not had an administration like this, it probably would have been extremely difficult to come out of recessions. Not just based on what was happening in Nigeria but within a global context but because of the level of prudence of this administration, it was much easier to come out of recession at different time,” he said.
Though, he admitted that the Buhari administration has not fully succeeded in taming the problems of insecurity and corruption in the country, he said government actions in those directions are also commendable.
“But today, do Nigerians have a reason to dance, I will say no and I say yes, because of a lot of infrastructural development. But how do you celebrate accomplishment in terms of infrastructural development when there is so much insecurity in the land?
“When people cannot travel on our roads, even a lot of the trains we had acquired, the rail infrastructure that we had built and all that cannot be put to use by people. So it becomes difficult for you to say you have a cause to celebrate,” he added.